Meet the Economist Behind the One Percent’s Stealth Takeover of America

[ZiprHead]

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/meet-the-economist-behind-the-one-percents-stealth-takeover-of-america

Nobel laureate James Buchanan is the intellectual linchpin of the Koch-funded attack on democratic institutions, argues Duke historian Nancy MacLean

Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that his philosophy is so stark that even young libertarian acolytes are only introduced to it after they have accepted the relatively sunny perspective of Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly). If Americans really knew what Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively his vision is manifesting under their noses, it would dawn on them how close the country is to a transformation most would not even want to imagine, much less accept.

 

[untermensche]

Nothing stealth about it.

It is clear to those with eyes.

 

[lpetrich]

"Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that his philosophy is so stark that even young libertarian acolytes are only introduced to it after they have accepted the relatively sunny perspective of Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly)."

When researching James Buchanan, NML discovered some letters between JB and Charles Koch, that Koch-brothers oligarch.

In thinking about how people make political decisions and choices, Buchanan concluded that you could only understand them as individuals seeking personal advantage. In an interview cited by MacLean, the economist observed that in the 1950s Americans commonly assumed that elected officials wanted to act in the public interest. Buchanan vehemently disagreed — that was a belief he wanted, as he put it, to “tear down.” His ideas developed into a theory that came to be known as “public choice.”

Buchanan’s view of human nature was distinctly dismal. Adam Smith saw human beings as self-interested and hungry for personal power and material comfort, but he also acknowledged social instincts like compassion and fairness. Buchanan, in contrast, insisted that people were primarily driven by venal self-interest. Crediting people with altruism or a desire to serve others was “romantic” fantasy: politicians and government workers were out for themselves, and so, for that matter, were teachers, doctors, and civil rights activists. They wanted to control others and wrest away their resources: “Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves,” he wrote in his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty.

Does that sound like your kindergarten teacher? It did to Buchanan.

The people who needed protection were property owners, and their rights could only be secured though constitutional limits to prevent the majority of voters from encroaching on them, an idea Buchanan lays out in works like Property as a Guarantor of Liberty (1993). MacLean observes that Buchanan saw society as a cutthroat realm of makers (entrepreneurs) constantly under siege by takers (everybody else) His own language was often more stark, warning the alleged “prey” of “parasites” and “predators” out to fleece them.

Like many capitalism apologists, he completely agreed with Marxists that humanity is divided into makers and takers, but like them, he had a different identification of those two classes. He also made Ayn Rand seem sunny and cheerful, with her celebration of great heroes.

He taught people how to push back against civil-rights legislation, and how to do so with political and economic arguments instead of with racial ones. He had a predecessor in John Calhoun, an early 19th cy. Southern politician and a big defender of slavery. JC wanted to create "constitutional gadgets" to keep governments from doing very much to his fellow slave-plantation oligarchs, and JB follows in that tradition. "She argues that unlike even the most property-friendly founders Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, Buchanan wanted a private governing elite of corporate power that was wholly released from public accountability."

At the 1997 fiftieth anniversary of the Mont Pelerin Society, MacLean recounts that Buchanan and his associate Henry Manne, a founding theorist of libertarian economic approaches to law, focused on such affronts to capitalists as environmentalism and public health and welfare, expressing eagerness to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare as well as kill public education because it tended to foster community values. Feminism had to go, too: the scholars considered it a socialist project.

Feminism socialist???

 

[lpetrich]

Like Milton Friedman, John Buchanan advised Pinochet's government in Chile, but he was careful to keep a low profile. Murderous dictators were OK with him and many other capitalism apologists as long as they protected those apologists' beloved oligarchs.

Nancy MacLean suspects that many liberals have missed the broader picture in privatization initiatives. It's not simply about who can do things more efficiently.

Instead, MacLean contends, the goal of these strategies is to radically alter power relations, weakening pro-public forces and enhancing the lobbying power and commitment of the corporations that take over public services and resources, thus advancing the plans to dismantle democracy and make way for a return to oligarchy. The majority will be held captive so that the wealthy can finally be free to do as they please, no matter how destructive.

That's why those most interested in "school reform" are most often billionaires and financiers, and not educators. People would a desire to suck education-money subsidies, it often seems. One doesn't see much of turning schools into teacher-run cooperatives, an alternate form of privatization.

MacLean argues that despite the rhetoric of Virginia school acolytes, shrinking big government is not really the point. The oligarchs require a government with tremendous new powers so that they can bypass the will of the people. This, as MacLean points out, requires greatly expanding police powers “to control the resultant popular anger.” The spreading use of pre-emption by GOP-controlled state legislatures to suppress local progressive victories such as living wage ordinances is another example of the right’s aggressive use of state power.

Then privatization of prisons and other such things, like the polluted water of Flint, MI. The Mackinac Center, a Koch-funded lobbying group, got the Michigan legislature to permit the state's governor to appoint emergency managers -- and to protect those managers against lawsuit. In Flint, one of them switched the city's water supplies to a polluted river.

Tyler Cowen has provided an economic justification for this kind of brutality, stating that where it is difficult to get clean water, private companies should take over and make people pay for it. “This includes giving them the right to cut off people who don’t—or can’t—pay their bills,” the economist explains.

To many this sounds grotesquely inhumane, but it is a way of thinking that has deep roots in America. In Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative (2005), Buchanan considers the charge of heartlessness made against the kind of classic liberal that he took himself to be. MacLean interprets his discussion to mean that people who “failed to foresee and save money for their future needs” are to be treated, as Buchanan put it, “as subordinate members of the species, akin to…animals who are dependent.’”

Do you have your education, health care, and retirement personally funded against all possible exigencies? Then that means you.

I'd like this extended to the sorts of things that these oligarch sycophants want governments to do, like protect them. If you get mugged, that means that you are too lazy to protect yourself from getting mugged, and therefore your mugger should not be punished for mugging you.

“The United States is now at one of those historic forks in the road whose outcome will prove as fateful as those of the 1860s, the 1930s, and the 1960s,” writes MacLean. “To value liberty for the wealthy minority above all else and enshrine it in the nation’s governing rules, as Calhoun and Buchanan both called for and the Koch network is achieving, play by play, is to consent to an oligarchy in all but the outer husk of representative form.”

Much like the antebellum South, which was pretty much these oligarch sycophants' dream world. Governments so limited that law enforcement was often done by vigilantes and private militias, for instance. But governments protecting slavery and suppressing criticism of it. Slaves were property, and property is an absolute right, so governments must protect slavery.

 

[lpetrich]

As to the antebellum South, I can't help but think of what present-day capitalism apologists might have said back then.

They might have defended plantation slavery as capitalism and thus absolutely legitimate. Slavery they would have defended as property rights. "Would you want the government to define your property out of your hands? Do you think that they'd stop at slavery? Look what will be next. Your land, your livestock, your house, your tools, even your clothes. Will those greedy bastards stop at *anything*?" Also, "Their predecessors brought the ancestors of these slaves from African chieftains in completely voluntary transactions. What you propose is pure coercion."

They would have said to abolitionists "You want to free slaves? Buy some and free them yourself. Don't beg the government to steal them for you." They would have said to anyone complaining about slave-plantation owners having too much influence: "Make yourself rich! Make yourselves as rich as they are! Make yourselves rich enough to buy the influence that you claim that they are buying! Don't beg the government to do things that you are not willing to do for yourself. And by the way, you don't deserve to be listened to if you continue to be a bunch of failures!"

Also, "If you don't like slavery, then don't buy slave-grown cotton. Your objecting to slavery while eagerly buying slave-grown cotton stinks of hypocrisy!" But if someone proposed boycotting slave-grown cotton, "You will hurt the wrong people. Their livelihood, the food they eat comes from selling the cotton that they grow. You'd be condemning them to death by starvation." But if anyone suggests taking aim at the slaveowners, "That is class warfare. It is class envy. It is class hatred. It is what those disgusting French revolutionaries did, slicing off the heads of everybody worthwhile in France. It is hatred of success. It is wanting to get something without working for it. What spoiled brats. What lazy bums. I bet you none of them work for their living."

It's hard for me to compete with this satire: If Today's Politics Had Been in WW2 -- it would be interesting to see what an 1850's version might look like. Like some mealymouthed centrist wringing his hands about how equally bad both sides are.